⁂ We have received the following interesting communication from a
gentleman who has spent much of a valuable life in Africa.
The serpents of South Africa, commonly accounted the most dangerous, are
the Cobra-Capello, (or hooded snake,) the Puff-Adder, and the Berg-Adder
(or mountain snake.) The first of these is exceedingly fierce and
active, and sometimes, it is said, attains the formidable length of ten
feet; I have, however, never met with any of much more than half that
size. The Cobra has been known to spring at a man on horseback, and to
dart himself with such force as to overshoot his aim. The Puff-Adder, on
the other hand, is a heavy and sluggish animal, very thick in proportion
to its length, and incapable, when attacked in front, of projecting
itself upon its enemy. To make amends, however, it possesses the faculty
of throwing itself backward with perilous and unexpected effect; but its
disposition is inert, and unless accidentally trod upon or otherwise
provoked, it will seldom attack mankind. The Berg-Adder, though much
smaller in size than either of the preceding, is generally considered
not less deadly, and it is the more dangerous from its being less easily
discovered and avoided.
During a residence of six years in the interior of the Cape Colony, and
in the course of various journeys through the interior, (extending to
upwards of three thousand miles,) I have met with a considerable number
of snakes; yet I do not recollect of ever being exposed, except in one
instance, to any imminent hazard of being bit by any of them. On the
occasion referred to I was superintending some Hottentots, whom I had
employed to clear away a patch of thicket from a spot selected for
cultivation, when one of the men, suddenly recoiling, with signs of
great alarm, exclaimed that there was a Cobra-Capello in the bush. Not
being at that time fully aware of the dangerous character of this
species of snake, I approached to look at him. The Hottentots called out
to me to take care, for he was going to spring. Before they had well
spoken, or I had caught a view of the reptile, I heard him hiss
fiercely, and then dart himself towards me amidst the underwood. At the
same instant, instinctively springing backward to avoid him, I fell over
a steep bank into the dry stony bed of a torrent; by which I suffered
some severe bruises, but fortunately escaped the more formidable danger
to which I had too incautiously exposed myself. The Hottentots then
assailed the snake with sticks and stones, and forced him (though not
before he had made another spring and missed one of them still more
narrowly than myself) to take refuge up a mimosa tree. Here he became a
safe and easy mark to their missiles, and was speedily beaten down, with
a broken back, and consequently rendered incapable of farther mischief.
The Hottentots having cut off his head, carefully buried it in the
ground, a practice which they never omit on such occasions, and which
arises from their apprehension of some one incautiously treading on the
head of the dead snake, and sustaining injury from its fangs; for they
believe that the deathful virus, far from being extinguished with life,
retains its fatal energy for weeks, and even months afterwards. This
snake measured nearly six feet in length, and was the largest Cobra I
have met with.
My little Hottentot corporal, Piet (or Peter) Spandilly, who assisted in
killing this Cobra, had a still narrower escape from a small but
venomous snake of which I have forgotten the colonial appellation. Piet
and his men (six soldiers of the Cape corps, placed at that time under
my direction for the protection of our remote settlement against the
Caffres) slept in a tent adjoining to mine, pitched in a grove of
mimosas on the brink of the Bavian’s river; and one morning when he rose
from his couch of dry grass, Piet felt some living creature moving about
his thigh in the inside of his leathern trowsers. Thinking it was only
one of the harmless lizards which swarm in every part of South Africa,
he did not at first much mind it, but came out to the open air laughing,
and shaking his limb to dislodge the vermin. But when a black wriggling
snake came tumbling down about his naked ancles, poor Spandilly uttered
a cry of horror, kicked the reptile off, springing at the same moment
nearly his own height from the ground; and though he had in reality
sustained no injury, could scarcely for some time be persuaded that he
was not “a gone man.”
It is, in fact, from apprehensions of danger, or the instinct of
self-defence, far more than from any peculiar fierceness or innate
malignity, that the serpent race ever assail man or any of the larger
animals. They turn, of course, against the foot that tramples or the
hand that threatens them; but happily nature has not armed them, in
addition to their formidable powers of destruction, with the disposition
of exerting these powers from motives of mere wanton cruelty, or for
purposes unconnected with their own subsistence or security. Were it
otherwise, countries like the Cape would be altogether uninhabitable. As
it is, the annoyance experienced from the numerous poisonous snakes is
not such as, on the whole, to affect in any considerable degree the
comfort of those accustomed to them.
Conversing on this subject one day with my friend Captain Harding, who
had been for many years a resident and magistrate in the interior, I
inquired whether he had ever, in the course of his campaigns on the
Caffer and Bushman frontiers, and when necessarily obliged to sleep in
the desert or jungle in the open air, suffered injury or incurred danger
from serpents--he replied, that the only occasion he recollected of
incurring any great hazard of this sort, was the following:--
“Being upon a military expedition across the frontier,” said he, “I had
slept one night, as usual, wrapt in my cloak, beneath a tree. On awaking
at daybreak, the first object I perceived on raising my head from the
saddle, which served for my pillow, was the tail of an enormous
Puff-Adder lying across my breast, the head of the reptile being muffled
under the folds of the cloak close to my body, whither it had betaken
itself, apparently for warmth, during the chillness of the night. There
was extreme hazard that if I alarmed it by moving, it might bite me in a
vital part;--seizing it therefore softly by the tail, I pulled it out
with a sudden jerk, and threw it violently to a distance. By this means
I escaped without injury; but had I happened to have unwittingly
offended this uninvited bedfellow before I was aware of his presence, I
might in all probability have fatally atoned for my heedlessness.”
It is not very unusual for snakes of various sorts to be found in the
houses at the Cape, nor does it, in ordinary cases, excite any violent
alarm when such inmates are discovered. They make their way both through
the roofs and under the walls, in search of food and shelter, and
especially in pursuit of mice, which many of them chiefly subsist upon.
During my residence in the interior, however, I recollect only two
instances of their being found in my own cabin. On one of these
occasions I had sent a servant girl (a bare-legged Hottentot) to bring
me some article from a neighbouring hut. It was after night-fall; and on
returning with it, she cried out before entering the cabin--“Oh,
Mynheer! Mynheer! what shall I do? A snake has twined itself round my
ancles, and if I open the door he will come into the house.” “Never
mind,” I replied. “open the door, and let him come if he dare.” She
obeyed, and in glided the snake, luckily without having harmed the poor
girl. I stood prepared and instantly smote him dead; and afterwards
found him to be one of the very venomous sort called _Nachtslang_.
People get used to these things, and even Europeans by degrees come to
regard them with much indifference. Just before leaving the colony, I
spent a week or two with my friend Major Pigot, at his residence near
Graham’s Town; and going one day to take a book from some shelves in the
drawing-room, I found a beautiful yellow snake, about five feet long,
lying asleep upon the uppermost range of books. It lay so still that I
at first thought it was a stuffed specimen; but perceiving a slight
movement in its tail, I lent him such a thwack with a quarto volume as
broke the poor fellow’s back, and enabled me to demolish him at my
leisure. I afterwards learned that another snake had been killed a few
days previously in the very same spot, and a third in Major P.’s
dressing-room. They had all entered through a loop-hole which had
casually been left open, and apparently had no other object in coming
there (mousing apart) than literary seclusion.
Such as these are no very uncommon occurrences, and as such pass even
for subjects of jocularity amidst the adventures of a wild country.
Instances, however, both frightful and revolting, sometimes occur.
It is well known that the Bushmen, a tribe of wild Hottentots who
inhabit the mountains and deserts of South Africa, imbue the points of
their arrows in a strong and subtle poison, and that the venom of the
most dangerous serpents to be found in that country forms a principal
ingredient in its composition. The boldness and dexterity displayed by
these wild huntsmen, and by many also of the colonial Hottentots, in
searching out and seizing alive the formidable Cobra-Capello and
Puff-Adder, are truly astonishing. Still more surprising is it to
witness the snake-hunter extracting from the yet living and writhing
reptile, held fast by his naked foot planted on its neck, the little bag
containing the secreted venom, which the rage of the animal injects into
the wound made by its fangs at the moment it strikes its victim--to see
him take this, and fearlessly drink its contents, as school-boys in
England would suck the blob of the honey-bee! The swallowing of this
venom, they conceive, renders them in time proof against its deleterious
effects, when it is brought into immediate contact with the blood,
whether by the bite of a snake or the barb of an arrow.
[Illustration: Cobra-Capello.]
Several of the most respectable Dutch colonists assured me, as a fact
which had come within their own knowledge, that there are to be found
among the wandering Bushmen persons whom they term _slang-meesters_
(snake-masters,) who actually possess the power of charming the fiercest
serpents, and of readily curing their bite; and who pretend that they
can communicate to others their mysterious powers and invulnerability,
by putting them through a regular course of _poison-eating_.
The more usual object, however, of the Bushman in catching serpents
(exclusive of their value to him as an article of food,) is to procure
poison for his arrows. The animal venom, too thin and volatile to
preserve its efficacy long unimpaired when used alone, is skilfully
concocted into a black glutinous consistency, by the admixture of
powerful vegetable and mineral poisons; the former being generally the
juice of the root of a species of amaryllis, called by the boors, from
this circumstance, the _gift-bol_, or poison-bulb; the latter, a
bituminous or unctuous substance which is said to exude from certain
rocks and caverns. With this deadly mixture the dwarfish and despised
African anoints the desperate weapons with which he resists (though
unavailingly) the aggressions of the colonists, and sometimes cruelly
revenges the injuries they have inflicted.
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